Petrified Forest
2013.11.06
Day One Hundred and Forty Eight. And Day 5 of our Epic Cross Country Road Trip! Petrified Forest National Park was a must. I'd read all of the reviews warning about how boring it was, but I wasn't about to let that stop me from seeing trees that were literally hundreds of millions of years old. I'll freely admit that the Petrified Forest is no Yosemite, but how many trees does Yosemite have that have turned to colorful quartz over the past 200 million years? Spoiler Alert: zero. Each location needs to be assessed on its own merits. I can easily see why people would call this place boring. As we were driving through, I was bored most of the time too. I struggled to find interesting subjects. There was a lot of dead space between interesting features ... a lot. There's by no means excitement around every corner. And, to top it all off, the sky was flat blue. There wasn't a cloud for thousands of miles. THOUSANDS. Ok, maybe not thousands, but there wasn't a single cloud in the sky. Landscapes are always missing something when there's no cloud cover. Regardless, I did the best I could with the conditions Gaia provided me, and in post, I think the black and white treatment turned out quite well. I feel like I was at least able to accurately capture the mood of the day. And, I don't know if photographic abstract expressionism is a thing or not, but that's how I feel about the macro work I did with the petrified wood. I doubt Jackson Pollock would be jealous of my captures, but that's ok. I'm not jealous of his work either ;)
